Supporting Searching on Small Screen Devices Using Summarisation

In recent years, small screen devices, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy phenomenal popularity. PDAs can be used to complement traditional computing systems to access personal multimedia information beyond the usage as digital organizers. However, due to the physical limitations accessing rich multimedia contents and diverse services using a single PDA is more difficult. Hence, the Situated Computing Framework (SCF) research project at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) aims to develop a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that facilitates nomadic users to access rich multimedia contents using small screen devices. This paper describes a new distributed computing concept, the Small Screen/Composite Device (SS/CD) framework, which offers mobile users new classes of ubiquitous and mobile multimedia services without to limit the diversity and the richness of the provided services.

Today, the average consumer is comfortable browsing a web site using a desktop, laptop or kiosk computer. However, this is changing a rapid rate as more and more consumers access the same web content using a small screen device such as a mobile phone or personal digital assistant (PDA). Regardless of the consumers’ expertise with the mobile device, the experience is becoming frustrating as they try to navigate their way through web content that has been designed for a large screen; a design that results in cumbersome layout, slow-loading images and ‘off-screen’ navigation points when viewed on a small screen device. The result is dissatisfaction on part of the consumer, and possible loss of revenue for an e-business enterprise. The main objective of this paper is to highlight several techniques and technologies that are currently available that can assist in displaying ‘user-friendly’ web pages regardless of the screen size of the device.

In this study we focused on the social representations of digital teaching among Higher Education agents, considering their reported experience (more or less diversified) and type of access (mobile devices or not, large-screen devices or small screen-devices). The context of the study was a public Higher Education institution in the North of Portugal in which the Moodle was adopted years-ago to support learning activities. The participants were 36 teachers (39% males, 61% females), aged between 25 and 55 years-old, and 144 freshmen students (20% males, 80% females), aged between 18 and 57 years-old, enrolled in different programs in the area of Health care. They answered to a questionnaire that consisted of: free association tasks around stimuli such as digital teaching and Moodle; a semantic differentiation scale on the attitudes towards Moodle; multiple choice questions about the levels of use and type of access to the platform; and demographic questions, including age and sex. A content-analysis of the qualitative data was conducted, using a macro developed in Excel. Words evoked by the participants were reduced to their most common form and phases rewritten to their common theme. Words and themes were then grouped under overarching categories. A descriptive analysis of the quantitative data was also performed. Results revealed that whereas for the teachers the semantic field of digital teaching consisted of the categories accessibility (47%), evolution (42%), and distance (39%); for the students it consisted of technology (97%), evolution (59%), and easiness (37%). The Moodle was seen as a kind of repository by the majority of the students (89%). Such image is shared by less than one half of teachers (36%) and it was more common among those who declared to use more functionalities of the learning management system (LMS). It is worth mentioning that almost one half of students associated the Moodle with knowledge (49%). Errors and the dependency on the Internet were pointed out as the main constrains of the LMS, while accessibility and easiness of use were the main advantages. With respect to access, the portable computer was the device most used by both teachers and students (90%). Desktops were used by more than 80% of teachers and by less than 20% of students, while the reverse picture was found in the access by mobile phone (around 20% of teachers and around 70% of students). This study provides interesting clues about the relation between the social position of the agents and their representations. The social representations seem to be more homogeneous among students than among teachers, suggesting that there is a relation with practices. The fact that the image of the Moodle as a repository is more present among the teachers who reported having used more functionalities of the Moodle is somewhat counter-intuitive and urges for more studies. It is also very suggestive that the agents use different anchors to represent digital teaching: distance in the case of the teachers and technology in the case of the students, though they converge in seeing it as a sign of evolution. Although mobile access seems to be more frequent among students, big screen devices are more used than small screen devices. These results do not support the idea of a screen-device gap among the participants, but should nevertheless open a discussion about what kind of affordances are being explored in digital teaching.

In this paper, we illustrate the use of space-time trade-offs for information presentation on small screens. We propose the use of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) to provide a rich set of navigational information for Web browsing. The principle of RSVP browsing is applied to the development of a Web browser for small screen devices, the RSVP browser. The results of an experiment in which Web browsing with the RSVP browser is compared with that of a typical WAP browser suggests that RSVP browsing may indeed offer alternative to other forms of Web browsing on small screen devices.

Small screen appliances, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy enormous popularity as is evidenced by the tremendous commercial success. One focus of the ubiquitous research community is the potential utility of this class of devices beyond that of a basic organizer or communication device. The pocket-sized requirement imposes constraints upon the computational power and user interface of these small screen devices. This paper describes the Composite Device Computing Environment (CDCE) that offers a framework for supporting nomadic users with small screen devices for the retrieval of rich contents and the access of diverse services. CDCE provides a communication network infrastructure for seeking, unifying and exploiting any surrounding devices as a means to overcome the small screen client constraints. This paper describes the architecture and reports the current status of the ongoing realization of CDCE.

Design of text entry on small screen devices, e.g. smartwatches, faces two related challenges: trading off a reasonably sized keyboard area against space to display the entered text and the concern over fat fingers. This paper investigates tap accuracy and revisits layered interfaces to explore a novel layered text entry method. A two part user study identifies preferred typing and reading tilt angles and then investigates variants of a tilting layered keyboard against a standard layout. We show good typing speed (29 wpm) and very high accuracy on the standard layout - contradicting fears of fat-fingers limiting watch text-entry. User feedback is positive towards tilting interaction and we identify ∼14° tilt as a comfortable typing angle. However, layering resulted in slightly slower and more erroneous entry. The paper contributes new data on tilt angles and key offsets for smartwatch text entry and supporting evidence for the suitability of QWERTY on smartwatches.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to carry out a survey in order to better understand the nature of handheld mobile computing use by academic library users and to determine whether there is a significant demand for using the library services with these small screen devices.Design/methodology/approachA survey is created to measure whether people want to access an OPAC with a small screen. Additionally, through open‐ended questions, the survey attempts to gain a broader understanding of handheld mobile computing's impact on, and implications for, the services provided by academic libraries.FindingsA total of 58.4 percent of respondents who own a web‐enabled handheld device indicate that they would use small screen devices, such as PDAs or web‐enabled cell phones to search a library OPAC.Originality/valueThe increasing prevalence of handheld mobile computing devices such as PDAs and web‐enabled cell phones warrants investigation as to its impact on libraries. This study examines an academic library user population and the potential demand for using the library's catalog with handheld mobile computing devices

Online graphics recognition has become the key problem for pen-based user interface on small screen devices, such as PDA and Tablet PC. In this paper, a novel constraint-based approach to online graphics recognition is proposed. The key idea of our approach is that when the user is drawing a graphic object, the system can extract the constraints between primitives and basic shapes from the object and use these constraints to retrieve similar graphic objects from the database at run time. The user can then choose the standard object from the ranked list of results to replace his sketches before he finishes drawing all strokes of the object. For this purpose, we summarize three types of primitives and several types of basic shapes as the basic components of a graphic object. We also define a set of constraints between primitives and basic shapes to represent their structural relations. The algorithms for online constraint extraction and graphics recognition are also presented. Experimental results show that our approach is efficient for online graphics recognition and effective for improving the user’s productivity.

A great deal of research has been done focusing on font, text size, and background colors for use with PowerPoint and on Web pages; but no research has been done to aid in the development of PowerPoint presentations for use on small screen devices such as the iPod.In this study, the researcher developed a PowerPoint that tested font size and clarity, text color against background, as well as clarity of images and graphs and found that much of what works in a quality PowerPoint presentation for computer screens does not work for small screens. This paper presents the result of this study and suggests some guidelines that can be used to create video podcasts that can be viewed in a variety of settings; thereby making the video podcast a useful extension of the classroom PowerPoint.

ABSTRACTZooming is a basic operation that many digital maps support for exploring them interactively. Especially for maps on small screen devices, this is a helpful operation to uncover the user's region of interest possibly hidden by labels, e.g. points of interest represented by icons. However, by scaling the map larger the user loses the context. As a consequent the user might need to repeatedly zoom in and out to explore the map step by step.We present an approach that reduces the necessity of zooming by providing the user with the possibility of displacing the labels of a circular focus region. To that end, we utilize techniques from focus+context maps implementing the displacement of the labels by fish-eye projections. The visual association between labels and their point features is established by connecting lines aggregated to bundles. Our approach particularly guarantees that labels move smoothly when the user continuously shifts the focus region, which reduces distracting flickering effects while exploring the map by panning the map view. Further, when the user stops moving the focus region, mathematical programming is applied to optimize positions of the displaced labels. In an evaluation on real-world data and synthetically generated data, we show that our approach substantially increases the legibility of both the focus region and the displaced labels.

Semantic information is necessary for Semantic Web processing and is useful to Web adaptation services such as personalization of users' browsing activities on small screen devices. However, semantic information is always implicitly encoded in most existing HTML documents. This paper describes a page segmentation method to parse Web pages into rectangular segments containing some semantic information, namely blocks. Existing page segmentation techniques are mainly built on HTML DOM structure or purely vision based, not accurate enough either in visual presentation or in semantic sense. Our approach is automatic, and based on a refined typing system which tightly couples type analysis with indispensable visual cues to generate blocks into the tree structure, aiming to achieve high degree of coherence in both semantic and visual views. Experimental results show better accuracy and completeness of our method over existing ones.

This study aims to develop a social recommendation media GIS (Geographic Information Systems) specially tailored to recommend tourist spots. The conclusions of this study are summarized in the following three points. (1) Social media GIS, an information system which integrates Web-GIS, SNS and recommendation system into a single system, was conducted in the central part of Yokohama City in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The social media GIS uses a design which displays its usefulness in reducing the constraints of information inspection, time and space, and continuity, making it possible to redesign systems in accordance with target cases. (2) The social media GIS was operated for two months for members of the general public who are more than 18 years old. The total numbers of users was 98, and the number of pieces of information submitted was 232. (3) The web questionnaires of users showed the usefulness of the integration of Web-GIS, SNS and recommendation systems, because the functions of reference and recommendation can be expected to support tourists’ excursion behavior. Since the access survey of log data showed that about 35% of accesses were from mobile information terminals, it can be said that the preparation of an optimal interface for such terminals was effective.

A perspective on ITS deployment

I. Introduction Studies reveal that often group members collaborate when searching for information even if they were not explicitly asked to collaborate [1]. The activity that involves a group of people engaging in a common information seeking task is called Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS). Over the past few years, CIS research has focused on providing solutions and frameworks to support the process [2]. However, work in this field to date has always assumed that information seekers engaged in CIS activity are using the same access modality, the visual modality. The attention on this modality has failed to address the needs of users who employ different access modalities such as haptic and/or audio. Visual Impaired (VI) employees in a workplace may often have to collaborate with their sighted team members when searching the web. Given that the VI individual's search behaviour is challenged by poor web design and the shortcomings of current assistive technology [3][4]; collaboratively engaging in w...

Googling for Health Information